Aero Fighters

Aero Fighters (known as Sonic Wings in Japan) is a vertical-scrolling shoot 'em up ("shmup") arcade game released in 1992 by Video System, ported to the Super Famicom in 1993 and the Super Nintendo in 1994.

It spawned two sequels for the Neo-Geo, one for the Arcades (with ports to the PlayStation and Sega Saturn) and one in 3-D for the Nintendo 64. The first sequel was notorious for multiple instances of Engrish, such as "I never thought I'd be frying over a jungle." Most of the creative team that worked on Aero Fighters created Strikers 1945 and other shmups for Psikyo.

Gameplay

There are eight stages in this game. The beginning stages consists of randomly chosen areas from nations of unselected fighters (assuming those fighters have nations). If Rabio or Lepus is chosen, all four rival nation stages become playable. After completing all rival nation stages, there are four more stages. Player and team-specific endings occur after completing the 1st loop. After completing the 2nd loop, the ending consists of all pilot pairs giving a speech, with the 2nd pilot in the last pair giving a cheat code.

The SNES version adds hidden boss attack and time attack modes, and two hidden playable fighters, Rabio and Lepus (from Rabio Lepus, known outside of Japan as Rabbit Punch). The Japanese version does not use kanji in text as in the arcade version. In the SNES version, there are two stage loops, and the order of rival nations is fixed. In the 2nd loop, the game's difficulty increased, except in the very hard difficulty, where the 2nd loop is easier.

Characters

A player can only chose a fighter from the respective side. In a 2-player game, the player that begins the game determines the available nation of both fighters, until the game ends.

External links

• Hamster Corporation page
• Aero Fighters at MobyGames
• Aero Fighters at Arcade-History
• Sonic Wings Wiki

Notes